By Terri Ann Parnell, DNP, MA, RN, FAAN
There is a heightened focus on the pivotal role that health literacy plays in the matrix between health system transformation, clinical management and population health. Integrating health literacy as an essential component of health care can often leave administrators overwhelmed and confused about how to best train their staff, especially when they employ thousands of healthcare providers.
Of course it is ideal to schedule in-person training sessions for hospital, clinic and practice staff to learn more about health literacy and the changes your organization should make. But what happens when those trainings are over? How can your organization foster culturally and linguistically appropriate practices that are sustainable over the long-term?
Customized e-learning materials are an efficient way to help your staff enhance and maintain effective patient-provider communication and reinforce health literacy best practices.
What are e-learning platforms?
E-learning platforms are interactive, digital programs that engage your employees through video, tools for learning, games, and knowledge checks. As an extension of our consulting engagements, teams work together to develop e-learning content based on their needs. These modules can be integrated into existing intranet or learning management systems (LMS) and carefully branded to represent an organization. The curriculum can be highly tailored and customized for specific organizations—large or small—and individualized healthcare populations.
The benefits of e-learning platforms for Health Literacy
E-learning platforms not only allow you to reinforce learning outcomes from live assessments and training workshops, they also allow you to more easily benchmark your organization’s progress, provide a consistent message, and offer flexibility in terms of completion of the modules. For example, a customized e-learning module could be required training for your staff at their hiring or as part of their annual review. You will be able to track who has completed the work, assess their proficiency and document the digital training for use with internal benchmarking or regulatory requests.
In addition, if you have a very large organization, you might consider training a small subset of champions via in-person workshops and then ask them to implement training for larger teams with the assistance of e-learning platforms. In essence, this model helps organizations disseminate goals, learning outcomes, and health literacy training consistently to any number of employees—without having to spend exorbitant amounts of money.
A customized approach—developed with you and especially for you
The best part about this service is that we can collaborate to create the modules that will best serve your organization’s patient population, primary health concerns, location and staff. We live in a digital world now, and working with Health Literacy Partners gives you the best of both worlds: reliable consistency and the unique approach your organization requires.
Together, we can help to improve your organization’s cultural competence, language accessibility and overall health literacy skills.
Contact Health Literacy Partners to learn more about how e-learning platforms can be integrated into your organization.